Girl of Nightmares by Kendare Blake: Most Anticipated YA Horror
The Waiting on Wednesday format was built for moments exactly like this one: a sequel to a book that had changed the terrain, arriving fourteen months after readers had finished the first novel wanting more. Girl of Nightmares by Kendare Blake was published on August 7, 2012 by St. Martin's Griffin, the sequel to Anna Dressed in Blood, which had appeared in September 2011 and quietly become one of the most talked-about YA horror debuts in years. In a market that had spent the preceding half-decade focused on paranormal romance — dark supernatural love stories where the monster was also the love interest, attractive by design — Anna Dressed in Blood had done something different. It had been a genuine horror novel. Anna Korlov killed people. The violence was real, the atmosphere was earned, and the story's emotional core derived not from romantic attraction softening the supernatural but from something more complicated and harder to categorize.
For the book blogging community, anticipating the sequel through a Waiting on Wednesday post was a way of marking that significance. The meme, originated by Jill at Breaking the Spine, asks bloggers to share a forthcoming title they are eagerly awaiting — cover, publication date, and the particular shape of their anticipation. For Girl of Nightmares, the anticipation was sharpened by genuine uncertainty about where the story could go. The first book had ended in a place that made a sequel both necessary and structurally difficult. Understanding why requires understanding what Anna Dressed in Blood had built.
Cas Lowood is a ghost hunter. The son of a hunter who died on the job, Cas travels North America with his mother and their cat, tracking down violent ghosts — the kind that have become something dangerous, something that kills — and dispatching them using an athame, a blade with supernatural properties that his father left him. This is his inheritance and his purpose, and Blake establishes it efficiently in the opening chapters of the first novel: Cas is competent, sardonic, and aware that his life is not normal. He is also, despite his competence, very young, and the ease with which he describes his work in the early sections of Anna Dressed in Blood is part of what the novel systematically dismantles.
When Cas is sent to Thunder Bay, Ontario to deal with Anna Korlov — a ghost known locally as Anna Dressed in Blood, infamous for killing anyone who enters the house where she died — the expected pattern does not play out. Anna is more powerful than any ghost Cas has encountered. She is also, in ways the novel takes its time revealing, something other than what she initially appears to be. The story of the first book is the story of Cas learning what Anna actually is, and that learning reframes everything that happens in Girl of Nightmares.
"In a market defined by paranormal romance, Anna Dressed in Blood had been a genuine horror novel. The sequel was awaited with the particular urgency of readers who had found something rare."
— Novel Sounds editorialThe Setup: What Girl of Nightmares Inherits
Without describing the specific resolution of Anna Dressed in Blood — the first novel contains significant plot developments that land harder without foreknowledge — it is enough to say that by the end of that book, Anna has been taken from Cas's world. She is somewhere he cannot follow by ordinary means, somewhere he has reason to believe is not simply oblivion but active suffering. The emotional premise of Girl of Nightmares is Cas's refusal to accept that this is the end. He is haunted by visions of her — glimpses that suggest she is aware, that she can see him, and that wherever she is, it is not peaceful.
This setup is unusual for a YA sequel. It does not begin with a new threat, a new adventure, or a new mission that happens to be adjacent to the events of the first book. It begins with grief and obsession, with a protagonist who is not coping well, and with the question of whether the thing that the first book appeared to resolve is actually over. Blake was doing something structurally interesting here: the sequel's inciting condition is the aftermath of the first book's climax, and the question it poses — can you go back? should you? — gives the story a different tonal register than the first novel's more conventional ghost-hunting momentum.
The English Setting and the Order of the Biodag Dubh
Anna Dressed in Blood is a North American Gothic. Its settings — Thunder Bay, the motels and highways of Cas's traveling life, the specific atmospheric weight of the Canadian north — give the first novel a regional flavor that is part of its identity. YA horror has a strong American tradition, and the first book drew on that tradition deliberately, placing Cas in the lineage of American ghost-story protagonists moving through a landscape that is large, isolating, and full of old deaths.
Girl of Nightmares breaks that setting by sending Cas to England. The reason is the Order of the Biodag Dubh, a secretive organization connected to the history and mythology of Cas's athame. The order is British, and reaching them requires Cas to cross the Atlantic — a move that functions both practically and symbolically. Practically, it expands the world of the duology beyond North America and suggests that the ghost-hunting tradition Cas inherited has roots in something older and more institutionally organized than his father's solitary work implied. Symbolically, the move to England signals that the sequel is operating on a different scale than the first book. The stakes are no longer local. Whatever Cas needs to do to reach Anna requires engaging with forces and histories that predate him by centuries.
Britain has its own dense tradition of Gothic and horror fiction — from the Victorian novels that helped define the genre to the particular atmospheric quality of English landscape and architecture that has always served horror writing well. Blake was drawing on that tradition for the novel's English sections, using the contrast between Cas's American directness and the older, stranger world he encounters in Britain as a source of narrative tension. The Order's secrecy, their rules and rituals, and their relationship to the athame all deepen the mythology in ways that give the sequel its own distinct texture.
Kendare Blake and the Making of a YA Horror Author
Kendare Blake's path to writing YA horror is worth understanding for what it illuminates about the Anna books' specific sensibility. She studied literature as an undergraduate at Ithaca College in New York and received a Master of Arts in creative writing from Middlesex University in London — the latter connection giving her a particular familiarity with British settings and literary culture that surfaces in Girl of Nightmares. Her graduate work in England is not incidental to the novel's English sections; the setting is informed by time spent there, not assembled from research alone.
Before writing Anna Dressed in Blood, Blake had been writing fiction for some years without placing it. The novel was sold after she found representation, and its success — critical attention, strong reader word-of-mouth, and the kind of community enthusiasm that the book blogging world was particularly effective at amplifying in 2011 and 2012 — established her quickly as a significant voice in YA dark fiction. The contract for Girl of Nightmares followed naturally, and the book appeared less than a year after the first.
After completing the Anna duology, Blake moved to different territory. The Goddess War trilogy (beginning with Antigoddess in 2013) drew on Greek mythology, placing gods in a modern setting as their powers fade toward a final conflict. This pivot from ghost horror to mythology-based fantasy was not uncommon among YA authors of the period who had established themselves in one dark subgenre and wanted to explore adjacent territory. Blake's subsequent career found its biggest commercial success with the Three Dark Crowns series, beginning in 2016 — a high fantasy series that became a New York Times bestseller and demonstrated an audience for her work well beyond the horror niche.
YA Horror in 2011–2012: A Genre Finding Its Footing
To appreciate why Anna Dressed in Blood and Girl of Nightmares were significant enough to anchor dozens of Waiting on Wednesday posts and generate genuine pre-publication community excitement, it helps to understand what YA dark fiction looked like in that period. The years between 2008 and 2012 were dominated by paranormal romance. The commercial success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series had demonstrated enormous market appetite for YA stories with supernatural elements, but the dominant template that followed was romance-first: the supernatural was backdrop, the monster was a love interest, and the darkness was atmospheric rather than frightening.
This was commercially successful but creatively limiting for readers who wanted actual horror — books where the supernatural was genuinely threatening, where violence had real weight, and where the story's tension derived from danger rather than romantic obstacles. Anna Dressed in Blood had addressed that appetite directly. Anna Korlov was not a love interest who happened to be a ghost. She was a ghost who happened to develop a connection with the person sent to destroy her, and the distinction mattered enormously in terms of how the book read. The violence was real. The horror was present. The atmosphere was earned through prose craft rather than romantic framing.
The book blogging community of 2011 and 2012 was particularly well-positioned to identify and amplify this distinction. YA book bloggers — primarily readers in their teens and twenties, often women, writing at length about books they loved on platforms like Blogger and WordPress — had developed sophisticated vocabularies for describing what made books work or not work. The Waiting on Wednesday meme was one mechanism through which anticipated books were discussed before their release, and the anticipation attached to Girl of Nightmares was notable for being specific: readers were not waiting for another paranormal romance with a different monster. They were waiting for a genuine sequel to a genuine horror novel.
The Covers and Their Significance
The original US cover of Girl of Nightmares, designed by St. Martin's Griffin, continued the aesthetic established by the first book's striking imagery. Anna Dressed in Blood had featured a young woman in a blood-soaked white dress against a dark background — an image direct enough to communicate horror rather than romance, and distinctive enough to be recognizable across thumbnail-size images in blog posts and social media. The cover worked for its category in a market where cover design often pulled horror in the direction of romance conventions.
Later editions and international printings of both books used different cover artwork, a common pattern for YA titles that go through multiple print runs as readership grows and cover design trends shift. The original cover is the one most associated with the book in early community discussion, and it did important work in establishing the visual identity of the duology before publication. For a book community that was heavily visual in how it shared and discussed forthcoming titles — cover reveals were significant events in themselves — a cover that communicated a book's actual genre was not a small thing.
The Waiting on Wednesday Moment
The Waiting on Wednesday format gave book bloggers a structured occasion for anticipation. A typical post would include the cover image, publication details, a summary of the plot setup, and an explanation of why this particular book was the week's most wanted. For Girl of Nightmares, the posts tended to emphasize the unresolved emotional situation from the first book, the expansion of the world promised by the English setting and the Order, and the relatively long wait between first and second installments — long by YA sequel standards, at least by the compressed publication schedules that characterized the genre's peak years.
There was also, in many of these posts, a quality of genuine uncertainty about whether the sequel could work. The first novel had been complete in itself in ways that made a continuation structurally challenging. Readers who had loved Anna Dressed in Blood wanted more of those characters in that world, but they had also registered, in some cases, that the first book's ending had a certain finality to it. The anticipation for Girl of Nightmares was therefore mixed with apprehension — a combination that is arguably the most engaged a reading community can be about an upcoming title. Pure excitement is simpler. Eager uncertainty is the sign of a readership that has actually thought about what the book needs to do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Girl of Nightmares is the second book in Kendare Blake's Anna Dressed in Blood duology, published August 7, 2012 by St. Martin's Griffin. It follows Cas Lowood, haunted by visions of Anna Korlov after the events of the first novel, as he tries to find a way to reach her and bring her back. The search takes him to England, where he encounters the Order of the Biodag Dubh — a secret organization connected to the history of his inherited athame.
Anna Dressed in Blood (2011, St. Martin's Griffin) follows Cas Lowood, a teenage ghost hunter who travels North America with his mother dispatching violent ghosts using his father's athame. When Cas is sent to Thunder Bay, Ontario to deal with Anna Korlov — a ghost notorious for killing anyone who enters her house — the mission does not go as expected. The novel is a YA horror story notable for treating its supernatural elements as genuinely frightening rather than romantically framed.
Kendare Blake is an American YA author. She studied literature at Ithaca College and earned an MA in creative writing from Middlesex University in London. She is the author of the Anna Dressed in Blood duology (2011–2012), the Goddess War trilogy (beginning 2013), and the Three Dark Crowns series (beginning 2016), which became a New York Times bestseller.
Yes. Girl of Nightmares is a direct sequel and its entire emotional premise depends on the events of the first novel. The two books form a complete duology and are designed to be read in order. Beginning with Girl of Nightmares would deprive the sequel of almost all its impact.
The Order of the Biodag Dubh is a secretive British organization in Girl of Nightmares that is connected to the history of Cas's athame. Their existence draws Cas to England and expands the mythology of the ghost-hunting world established in the first book, suggesting that Cas's inherited tradition has roots in older, more institutionalized practice than his solitary father's work implied.
Waiting on Wednesday is a book blogging meme originated by Jill at Breaking the Spine. Bloggers use it to spotlight forthcoming books they are eagerly anticipating, typically posting on Wednesdays with cover art, publication information, and an explanation of why the book is on their radar. The format was one of the most widely used in the YA book blogging community during the early 2010s.
Girl of Nightmares was published on August 7, 2012 by St. Martin's Griffin, approximately eleven months after Anna Dressed in Blood appeared in September 2011.
In 2011, the dominant trend in YA dark fiction was paranormal romance, where supernatural elements served romantic rather than frightening ends. Anna Dressed in Blood was a genuine horror novel — one where the ghost was authentically threatening and the violence had real weight. It helped demonstrate to publishers and booksellers that there was a substantial audience for YA horror that prioritized atmosphere and dread over romantic fantasy.
The Anna Dressed in Blood duology is generally recommended for readers aged 14 and up. Both books contain graphic horror violence, some strong language, and genuinely frightening content. They are authentic horror novels and are more intense than much of the YA market's dark fiction.
After completing the Anna Dressed in Blood duology, Blake wrote the Goddess War trilogy (beginning with Antigoddess, 2013), which reimagines Greek gods in a modern setting. Her subsequent series, Three Dark Crowns (beginning 2016), is a high fantasy story about triplet queens competing for a throne. It became a New York Times bestseller and ran to four main volumes plus a prequel.
Anna Dressed in Blood is set in North America, drawing on American and Canadian Gothic atmosphere — highway motels, the isolation of the Canadian north, the particular landscape of Thunder Bay. Girl of Nightmares breaks this setting by sending Cas to England to pursue the Order of the Biodag Dubh. The shift broadens the mythology and gives the sequel a different atmospheric register, one that draws on British Gothic tradition and the resonance of older, more institutional forms of secrecy.
Yes. The original US cover featured a girl in white against a dark background, continuing the visual language established by the first book. Later editions and international printings used different cover artwork. The original design is the one most associated with the book in early community coverage and Waiting on Wednesday posts from 2012.